Initial thoughts on new Plex Experience for Apple TV app

Plex Experience Preview
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The look of the UI and horizontal scrolling works much better on Apple TV (TV devices in general) than the new iOS app where it doesn’t work well at all. The incorporation of show logos is effective where accurate and high quality logos exist (not so much when they’re out of date or low quality but I know devs have said we’ll be able to edit those locally which is great). I still really don’t like having not option to set at least the Continue Watching row to use Show instead of Season posters as I have lots of useful info overlaid on my show posters that is all lost in the new UX. I haven’t seen devs address that particular point anywhere but I really hope that Show vs Season posters will become a user configurable option across the board.

A minor suggestion on the UX but one I think would make the app look more in line with other modern apps - implement the correct logos to represent e.g. Dolby Vision, HDR10+, Dolby Atmos, DTS etc. A supposedly modern look with boxes that just say “4K DoVi/HDR” looks a little incongruous.

Biggest gripe remains that everything is buried way too deep. If I want to see details on an episode I have to navigate to the show, then the season, then click the individual episode. Way too many layers to navigate. Which is a shame because I think the new Season view with description at the bottom looks pretty good but there’s plenty of space above next to the subtitle/CC icon to display media quality info, air date, episode length or ratings. If I click an item on the homscreen it takes me right to the individual episode details but I don’t think that’s an improvement on the previous version where doing so gave you the same information but in the season view. Long-holding for the menu on an item and selecting “Go to season”. takes you to the start of the season and doesn’t focus on the episode you selected so you can’t even shortcut that way.

I get with the new library navigation they want to tidy up the home screen and it does, but… does it aid navigation and discoverability? No. Quite the opposite. You can’t quickly get to different libraries and content from the sidebar of the home screen anymore. You’ve got to scroll all the way to the top, click libraries, then scroll horizontally to the library you want, then scroll vertical, then swipe left to bring up the side navigation bar, then choose Browse, Collections etc. It doesn’t even remember the last used tab like the previous app so I can’t at least go through them all and select Browse once and have them default to that. The result is that my own content is just so buried beneath layers that it makes discoverability and navigation a huge pain point.

Overall it’s similar to the launch of the new experience on mobile - I understand the rationale behind a unified interface but at the same time there seem to be a lot of conflict between making it clean and pretty versus actually making it useful, easy to navigate and surfacing the relevant detail. I’m slightly concerned at the lack of iteration or implementation of user feedback so far in the overall New Experience project since launch on mobile last year as that version is still horrible to use or navigate on a mobile device and a one-size fits all approach is clearly not going to work as mobile and big screen apps are two very different beasts.

If the new UX launches publicly in a state similar to present without a lot of refinement then I wouldn’t choose to use it over the existing app. So I’m hoping with the addition of a TV app preview major changes will start to happen to make the new app more modern, easily navigable and content far easier to access and discover.

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Completely agree with all of this.

I’ve had some ideas regarding the season/episode view problem but none of them are perfect. It’s a tricky one.
I’d be keen to see something like a long horizontal list of episode in show view (like what season view currently looks like) with season ## buttons above that dynamically jump to the start of that season in the row. This way you do away with season view altogether. You lose some things like season posters and, depending on the design, season descriptions but getting rid of all the extra clicks is fundamental - and if you ask me that’s the biggest problem with this app.

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  1. Played untouched DVD rips, i.e. mpeg2. Something was really wrong with this playback with both spatial and color fidelity being horrible. The old plex is fine here.

  2. Bandwidth from server is low…like 1/7 of the bandwidth of the “old” plex client. (100mbit/s vs 700mbit/s)

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Wow! What a change. I’m not sure about it yet but my first suggestion would be to bring back the swipe down from the top to show settings in playback. Having now to swipe down, then the awful standard Apple TV player shows up at the bottom of the clip, then having to scroll to the far right to click on three dot’s is awful to access subtitles, quality and audio. I often swiped right to the three dots but while I was scrolling to the right, the playhead would activate and move! It was way easier and much faster the current way of simply swiping down from the top.

May I add, one of the best features of the Plex Apple TV is the player as it currently is. The standard Apple TV player for other media apps just does not compare. Why throw away such a fantastic feature that makes the current Plex app standout from the others?

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I agree with a lot of this. Ditching the Apple UI in the player and burying content multiple levels deep makes navigating the new apps feel more like a chore.

I was testing the AppleTV app with my wife on the couch today, and she was completely turned off by having to press more buttons to do the same thing she was able to do in the public app with a single press.

It probably doesn’t help that the interface just feels slower right now too, hopefully that will get better with optimizations.

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Agree. I accidently fast forwarded content trying to go gown to three dots to check out the new UI for quality selection. I had no idea if what I was watching was in original quality, transcoded, what resolution it was, etc… I mean it looked good. I know the first test “Inside Out 2” is a 4k copy but on the movie card it only said “HD”. When going into the quality screen it said:
Original - 24mbps (About 10GB per hour) - this was checked off. Does this mean direct play? But what is the resultion, because the one below it says
1080p HD (High) 20 Mbps (About 9 GB per hour). So if thats 1080p, wouldnt Original be higher? Well what is it? 1440p? 2160p? Why doesn’t it say?

I then had another test movie, Oppenheimer. This one correctly displayed 4k on the movie details before playing. It did play fine and in the quality section it said Original 61 Mbps (About 26 GB per hour). It still doesn’t say next to that what the resolution is. I know its 2160p but that wasn’t very apparent on my last sample.

Lastly, I have a very extensive music library and I can’t seem to access it at all. Both Movies and TV Shows are “favorited” but theres no option to favorite music. We use it extensively and for that reason we will have to continue to use the old Plex app. I hope you bring music into this app with the nice rich UI along with lyrics, etc… rather than build it into a different app that we have to download and run. I like having everything in one app.

Screen shot:
Plex Beta Quality Selection - Not enough information

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Throwing in my initial reaction to this new preview as well, I won’t comment on the bugs/missing features as I know its a early build and things will get fixed/added (hopefully) in the future, but I seriously implore the team to take a hard look at the product before they intend to replace the current production app.

Its inherently obvious that the app was re-built using some crappy web framework app now. It no longer feels native to the platform. Between all of the interactions, the non-native player UI, the non-native UI components, the laggy input, the weird inconsistent padding everywhere it just feels much much worse than the previous app and more on par with something like the Amazon Prime app (which is not good).

Like others have mentioned the new flow is much worse than before, everything’s buried, there’s no customization anywhere, and none of the new bits really enhance the experience at all.

Ultimately this reeks of “we want to share the same code everywhere and Apple TV is a very small slice of the total ecosystem” but when the product suffers this much in the process I really hope the team will reevaluate the decision and not just push it through out of a sunk cost fallacy (take a look at what happened to Sonos)

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Why in grid view are there only 3 large previews? what was wrong with the way it was before, its not like it was too small, it was perfect size. this seems like change just to change things for no reason

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Hello Plex Team,

I recently tested the beta version of the updated Plex app on Apple TV, and I noticed a couple of significant changes that I wanted to provide feedback on.

Firstly, the removal of the reflective focus effect when navigating between items is, in my opinion, a major regression compared to the current version. This subtle but impactful effect added a lot of charm and polish to the interface, making the experience more immersive and visually engaging. It would be great to see this feature retained or reintroduced.

Secondly, I noticed that the spacing between text and other elements, such as movie posters and thumbnails, feels a bit cramped in the beta. Adding more space would improve readability and give the interface a cleaner, more polished look.

Additionally, I observed a few other issues in the beta:

When playing a file (movie, series, etc.), the on-screen playback bar is identical to the one on the mobile app, featuring buttons for play/pause, next, and previous files. On Apple TV, this is redundant since the remote already has a dedicated play/pause button. This UI element takes up unnecessary space and detracts from the streamlined Apple TV experience.

The playback bar and associated text do not utilize the full width of the screen, which feels inconsistent and limits the visual appeal.

Pressing the back button while the playback bar is visible does not simply dismiss the bar but instead navigates back to the previous page (e.g., the home screen or the movie/series detail page). This behavior is unintuitive and disrupts the viewing experience.

Some background illustrations or images do not scale properly to fit the screen, resulting in portions of the image being cut off. This diminishes the aesthetic quality of the interface.

These details might seem small, but they contribute significantly to the overall user experience. I hope these points can be considered as you refine the app further.

Thank you for your hard work and dedication to improving Plex!

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My view is that everything is simply too big. The AppleTV experience is likely to be viewed on a large television or projector, can we have smaller banners and thumbnails please?

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Huge agree, I know it’s a beta but everything feels sluggish and not native anymore.

I know plex isn’t a massive company like Netflix, but not having these apps optimized to the platform when they were before is a huge downgrade. Remember when 1Password did this?

Scrolling feels laggy and inconsistent.

Plus, the video player doesn’t really seem improved at all. In fact, it’s now struggling to play things the standard app plays fine.

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I’m struggling to see any positives here at all with this new Plex player for Apple TV. I think the best way to describe this is …“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”.

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Not integrating with native voice dictation is a challenge for me.

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For those wanting to jump on the non-native player UI talk specifically I’ve got a post here. Hoping that if it gets enough traction a Plex dev might take it back to the team for consideration.

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Yup. I miss voice search and input via my phone in a text input box.

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This reminds me of the Win8 rollout. Trying to make ALL devices look and work the same does NOT work. You would think that would be a known lesson by now.

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This is huge. If it doesn’t feel like a native app, but instead a boring TV app, I’m out. Well, I’ll use Infuse. One reason we pay extra for Apple TVs is because of the polished UI.

I understand the promise of easier to fix bugs and add features, and it’s nice to even see it come to fruition on some things already. I noticed alternate audio now lists the metadata, so we can more easily identify commentary tracks. And a feature I’ve been waiting years for, TV extras are all visible at the appropriate show/season/episode level.

I don’t like the logos. I know there will be opportunity to edit these server side. I’ve spent enough time curating the look of many of my library items, only to see mismatched logos among trilogies. And some logos I just don’t like the look of.

I’m glad this is being presented as a beta experience first, and I hope many of the comments are taken seriously.

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In a word? UNUSABLE

I’m not going to get into the design/layout changes, individual preferences being what they are, but I mean, come on, it is so LETHARGIC that it borders on unusable. It takes forever to load up the tiles for a library, and seems to not cache becuase it has to load them up with you go back up the list. And no way to get to the top except mindlessly (and glacially) scrolling back up?

Selecting a title takes quite a short eternity to bring up the info page, and then trying to play the movie gives you a spinning circle for another eternity before it starts playing audio (maybe) but with a black screen.

Totally unusable.

Granted, this is not a new Apple TV - It is a A1625 (64GB), but running tvOS 18.2.1 [22K160], so it should be working. It works with the old client just fine.

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Thanks for the tip on Infuse - trying it out now, VASTLY superior to this. If in the end this becomes the only option, then Infuse it will be.

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I’m on the latest 4K ATV and the UI is so slow it takes a literal second to update when I select (hover) on a new item.

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